Don’t Play Live Poker Like A Robot

I’m doing a series of companion articles to my most recent book, The Course: Serious Hold ’Em Strategy For Smart Players. It’s a step-by-step guide to mastering the live no-limit hold’em games that you will find in most cardrooms around the world.

There’s one idea that’s a huge stumbling block for many poker students in their development. To succeed early, most players find a set of rules that works. Play this hand from early position. Don’t play that one. If your draw doesn’t improve by the turn, fold. If they check to you on the river and you have two pair, bet. And so forth.

Without rigid rules to follow, it’s very easy to be wishy washy. And when you’re wishy washy in poker, the variance will destroy you. “Let me try betting here. Oops, that didn’t work. Next time I will check.”

Wishy washy is a bit of an unfair term, as this could just as easily be called learning from mistakes. In pursuits with no or little variance – knitting perhaps – this learning heuristic works great. “Ouch, I poked myself with the needle. Don’t do it that way anymore.”

But “learning from your mistakes” in knitting becomes wishy washy milquetoast poker play. If you just react to the most recent results of your plays, you will never ever beat the rake.

This is a bit of a long-winded way to say that the way players who do beat the rake first learn to do so is to be the opposite of wishy washy. To be rigid. To follow rules. To do it again the same way even if it didn’t work the last time, the last three times, the last eight times.

This is where the stumbling block comes in. When your first success comes from being anti-flexible, then you begin to try to find the rules for every situation. “Okay, well when I get reraised out of position on the turn and I hold top pair, I need to fold.” “Okay, I should bet 70 percent of the time in this situation, and these are the 70 percent of hands that I will do that with.”

If you’ve read my book Poker’s 1%, you will recognize that last rule as a nod to the ideas in that book.

Here’s the deal with rules. You can become an extremely tough-to-beat poker player by developing a robust and clever system of rules to follow. You can be unpredictable and darn near impossible to read for your opponents. If your goal is to become the very best poker player in the world, it’s worth a whole lot of your time to try to develop a ruleset like this. Because one of the important features of the best players in the world is that they’re very tough to beat.

But tough to beat isn’t the same as winningest. Tough to beat means your opponents won’t gain many edges over you. But it could also mean that your edges over your opponents are only moderate. In general, the more weaknesses your opponents have, the less you should care about being tough to beat. They won’t be able to generate edges over you very efficiently. But if they have weaknesses, and you can identify and target them over and over, you will generate big winrates.

If you prefer to play live no-limit, the rule-following, tough-to-beat approach is almost never the best approach. The goal is not to figure out the ideal way to play small flushes against a turn raise. The goal is to identify all the holes in your opponents’ games and to adapt to them.

So, we’re at an inflection point in the learning of live no-limit hold’em. Up to this point (in the five preceding articles, and in the first half of my book, The Course), the focus has indeed been on rules to follow. Heuristics designed to help you beat the rake and make a little on the top. But if you want to get better than that, you have to learn to become much more flexible as a player – without ceding the advantages you gained from following rules.

While very important, this advice is also vague. “Okay, Ed, break the rules. I get it. But how and when?”

Obviously that’s a question with an enormous answer. But I’ll give you one place to start looking. When you’re ready to move beyond following rules to become a better no-limit player, I’d say you should look for situations to stay in hands.

This means that you’re looking for spots to stick around when you otherwise would have folded, because your hand isn’t particularly good. Maybe it’s the flop and your opponent makes a continuation bet and you only have overcards.

When would you call with just overcards against a continuation bet? Typically it’s when your opponent would continuation bet with most if not all hands, and when the board can develop in a way that will cause your opponent to give up with many of these hands on the turn and river.

But it also means you’re looking for spots to stay in hands against turn bets, sometimes against big turn bets. Earlier in the series, I said that if your opponent bets big on the turn, you should fold. That’s the rule. It’s usually correct, but not always.

Let’s say you’re playing $2-$5 with $1,500 stacks. Your opponent is a tight, cautious player. He raises to $20 preflop from early position. You’re in middle position and you call with 9 7. A player calls on the button. The big blind calls. There’s $82 in the pot and four players to the flop.

The flop comes K 8 5. The preflop raiser bets $30, and you call. The button and big blind both fold. Here you’re calling the $30 with a gutshot and a backdoor flush draw. It’s perhaps not a slam dunk call, and maybe your “rules” would say to fold with two opponents behind. But it’s a call I’d make almost every time in live no-limit, as staying in the hand and watching the play develop will present many situations where you can give yourself an edge even if your hand is weak.

The turn is the A. There’s $142 in the pot, and your opponent bets $120.

Now it’s quite likely your rules say to fold. This is a big bet that marks your opponent with a strong hand. I’d guess based on the flop and turn betting that he’s probably got A-Q or A-J with perhaps some stronger hands like A-K, K-K, and A-A in the mix. Still I’d often call. I have a chance to draw out, and I also will usually get some excellent river information that can help me win the hand.

Say the river is the 9. Your opponent checks. Now it’s quite likely he’s got A-Q and A-J. And if you know the opponent well, you may know exactly how much to bet to get him to fold. ♠

Ed’s newest book, The Course: Serious Hold ‘Em Strategy For Smart Players is available now at his website edmillerpoker.com. You can also find original articles and instructional videos by Ed at the training site redchippoker.com.